Director – Robert Eggers – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 132m
*****
Unaware a woman has unwittingly summoned Count Orloc, her husband is sent to the latter’s castle in Transylvania – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, January 1st 2025
The German expressionist silent film Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) has been described as setting the cinematic template for the horror film. Broadly speaking, it’s an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, with names changed for the purposes either of connecting to the German audience or avoiding copyright issues. While there have been numerous Dracula movie adaptations and spin-offs over the years, remakes of the 1922 film are comparatively few and far between; prior to the current film, Werner Herzog notably made Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
Eggers is a great admirer of the 1922 film, and originally planned to remake it after The Witch (2015). It’s not hard to see why. His films have about them a terrible sense of dread, of dire events about to occur. Like F.W. Murnau, he is a great visual stylist (although the silent film industry of the 1920s was very different to the far more sophisticated sector of today). The film has had time to marinate in his head for the best part of a decade, which has probably done the project no harm at all.
He opens with little black and white title cards suggesting the 1920s and perhaps the austere aesthetic of The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019), starting off with a sequence involving an invocation for a presence to enfold her by a young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) which draws to her the vile and as-yet unnamed Count Orloc (Bill Skarsgård, unrecognisable because of the highly effective use of shadows by Eggers’ regular cinematographer Jarin Blaschke). She rises involuntarily into the air as if in a form of sexual ecstasy; she wanders at night on the ground in the gardens of a large house, and then she is on the ground, and the fiend is on top of her, or perhaps he’s only present in her imagination as she writhes alone. The camera sinks below ground level, as if to indicate dark forces in operation beneath the place where she lies.
This turns out to be a dream sequence from the younger years of the older Ellen, now recently married to and deeply in love with lowly estate agent’s clerk Thomas Hutter (Nicolas Hoult) in Wisborg. When, on occasion, she speaks to him of her dreams, he forbids further discussion. It’s 1836, and fortune appears to smile on Hutter, since his employer, estate agent Knock (Simon McBurney) has secured him a brief which, if he can get the client Count Orloc to sign, will secure the latter a mansion near the town and Hutter a permanent position in the firm, which means he will have the money he would wish to lavish upon his beloved Ellen. Alas, Hutter is unaware that his boss is a dabbler in the dark arts, concealing a multi-pointed star drawn on the floorboards beneath his office carpet, in which room (with the carpet rolled off the drawing) he communes with his occult master, Count Orloc. Moreover, the Count has insisted that a representative of the firm must travel in person to his Transylvanian castle to witness and sign the documents. Immediately.
So Hutter sets out on a six-week horse journey to the Carpathians, mysteriously losing his horse on a last overnight stop in the village below the mountain on which the Count’s castle sits. Following a dream in which a vampire hunter plunges a metal stake into the heart of a vampire lying in a coffin, he begins the final part of his journey on foot, being conveyed for the last part by an unexpected and unearthly coach and horses. The castle, when he arrives, is bleak and largely unfurnished. The Count wastes no time in presenting the agent with documents (in an arcane language Hutter does not understand) which he eventually has him sign. The Count also insists on being addressed as “My Lord”, and asks to see Hutter’s precious locket containing strands of his wife’s hair, which he the Count then fails to return to Hutter, despite Hutter’s protestations. Aside from missing his wife terribly, Hutter now finds himself in a dire situation; the count, a vampire, plans to feed off him.
Ellen’s situation back at home is scarcely better. She acts like a woman possessed, writhing sexually alone on the bed, to which she is tied by concerned physician Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), summoned by Thomas’ best friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who has been charged with looking after Ellen while her husband is away. Friedrich’s wife Anna (Emma Corrin), a good friend to Ellen and the mother of two small girls (possibly a nod to the murder victims in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, 1980), is also pretty cut up about it. Eventually, the good doctor brings in his mentor Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) – cruelly barred from academia because of his belief that demons are real – who insists that the doctor is doing it all wrong and Ellen must be untied immediately. She is now free to sleepwalk.
Knock, meanwhile, has been admitted as insane to the local asylum. Worse is to come, as the Count boards a ship to Germany, bringing with him the death of all crew on board and a plague of rats which infests Wisborg when the Count arrives intent on claiming both his legally purchased property and his ‘bride’ Ellen. However, the good professor has a plan to defeat him…
Eggers, as you might expect, draws terrific work both from his superb cast and his talented crew, with Depp tremendous as the leading lady and object of Orloc’s distant affections and Dafoe clearly enjoying himself as the professor whose very contempt for the approved wisdom of the day may well prove to be the factor that saves the infested town. The best performance here, however, comes unexpectedly from McBurney, who gives it his all as Orloc’s willing and devoted servant. As the Count, Skarsgård is given the thankless task of performing under a ton of (very impressive) prosthetics which obscure his unique physicality rather than exploit as Murnau did with Max Shrek in 1922 or Herzog did with the charismatic Klaus Kinski in 1979. Not Skarsgård’s fault, but somehow that element is disappointing.
Comparisons with the seminal 1922 film are inevitable; this doesn’t stand alongside its status as a milestone of cinema, because there’s a simplicity and a purity to Murnau’s film, its use of exaggerated performance and its truly extraordinary use of light. With the growth of sophistication in the production of contemporary cinematic images, something has been lost; there is an elemental power to Murnau’s film that Eggers can’t quite match. Nevertheless, its moments of excess are framed by admirable scenes of restraint which makes the horror, when it comes, all the more effective. The film leaves most modern gothic horror efforts standing (picking one at random, it’s far more effective than the recent Dracula film Renfield, Chris McKay, 2023, another film to star Nicolas Hoult), yet whatever its virtues, it’s still not quite Murnau.
Nosferatu is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, January 1st 2025.
Trailer: